Pizza Became the First Food Delivered Via the Web



What would you like to have for dinner tonight? Sushi? Pizza? A juicy cheeseburger? These days you just have to make up your mind what you want, and that’s it. It’s hard to imagine that food delivery wasn't this common until just a few years ago. The first recorded food delivery is believed to have taken place in Naples, Italy, in 1889. King Umberto I and Queen Margherita of Savoy were in Naples when they wanted to try the food of the people: the delicious pizzas of the famous pizza maker Rafaele Esposito. Three pizzas were delivered to the royal family, but the queen fell in love with pizza alla mozzarella and named it after herself, calling it Pizza Margherita. Skip forward a century and the first food delivery ordered online was also a pizza. CyberSlice was the first service to have successfully routed food to a delivery location using online web computer technology, so it was only fitting that it was ordered by Apple’s Steve Jobs. He ordered a pizza with tomato sauce and basil, which was hungrily consumed by the press at a 1996 Redwood City event. Once the online delivery cat was out of the bag, it would never go back.